Bot

Overview

A bot is software that carries out tasks automatically by following preset rules or a program. The word is short for "robot," and bots do repetitive work in place of humans. They're used for many purposes, such as search engine crawlers (bots that travel around web pages collecting information), chatbots (bots that reply automatically), and auto-posting bots on social media. Bots themselves are a neutral technology, but cases where they're used for malicious purposes have become a social problem.

Malicious bots on social media

On social media, bots are misused to inflate follower counts, automate likes and retweets, and send spam messages in bulk. Some services that sell followers work by having large numbers of bot accounts follow you. These bot accounts aren't real people, so even if your follower count goes up, your actual readership doesn't.

There are also bots that use face photos made with generative AI as profile pictures and automatically generate posts that look like a human wrote them. They're sometimes used to manipulate public opinion or spread false information, and social media platforms are working to detect and remove bots.

Bots that target question boxes

Question box services are a prime target for bots. That's because a simple form where you just type text and hit send is easy for a bot to automate. Bot attacks come in many patterns, such as spam questions containing ad links, floods of meaningless strings, and lures to phishing sites.

One way to counter bots is to combine several techniques. A honeypot (a dummy input field humans can't see) weeds out simple bots, Proof of Work (a computational puzzle) raises the cost of mass sending, and rate limiting caps how often someone can post. These measures work automatically when a message is sent, so human users can send questions without any extra input.

Telling good bots from bad bots

Not all bots are bad. Google's search crawler is a bot needed to show websites in search results, and blocking it hurts how a site appears in search. RSS reader bots automatically check for article updates. Chatbots on Discord and Slack make running a community more efficient.

The key to spotting bot accounts on social media is how unnatural the account seems. Typical signs include repeating the same post over and over, posting at mechanically even intervals, a profile that's blank or unnaturally perfect, and an extremely small number of followers compared with the number of accounts it follows. The right response to follows or messages from suspicious accounts is to not react and to block or report them.